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Product Hunt May 16

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Creating a well-designed site, product, or project usually isn’t cheap. You

know you want to make something that looks good–but how do you do it if
you’re working with a limited budget? While there’s no substitute for
hiring a great designer, there are ways to build something beautiful
without spending thousands of dollars—and it starts with the little
elements, like getting the font, icons, photos, and colors right.

Check out the list below for 21 of our favorite free (or close to free) design
resources. They are sure to make your next project visually stunning,
whether you’re a design novice or a professional.

Stock Photography

Stock photos and videos are notoriously expensive. While they are super
important for making your website, presentations, pitch decks, and sales
materials look sharp, few startups can afford to spend hundreds of dollars
on a limited license image.

If you’ve found yourself in this predicament before, here are a handful of

sites with free (or cheap) stock photos that are actually captivating and
don’t look like you just pulled them from a 90s business brochure:

Pexels

All photos on Pexels are free for personal and commerical use under a
Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. They currently have 30,000+ stock
photos on the site, and add around 3,00 new images each month.

Unsplash

Upsplash was originally a side project started by the Crew team. It literally
saved the company when it was a few weeks away from dying. Now, its a
standalone site, with new high-quality images popping up daily. Read the
inspiring story behind Unsplash here.

Stock Up

The Stock Up site features 15,000+ indexed photos from over 30 different
stock photography websites, like Life of Pix and Splitshire. Most of the
photos fall under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, but always
refer to the original image for details about the specific license before use.

Coverr

On Coverr, you’ll find beautiful, free videos for your homepage. Just
download your favorite one, upload it to your website, and add the
corresponding snippet of code to your site. Every Monday, you’ll find seven
new videos on the site.
Skuawk Public Domain Photos

If you’re looking for “artistically loud” images, you’ll find them on Skuwak
Public Domain Photos. This collection is more limited than what you’ll
find on some of the other photos sites, but if the aesthetic fits what you’re
looking for, this is a hidden gem.

Death to Stock

Death to Stock is a simple stock photography resource that is built

around “packs” of photos, each of which has a particular theme. Sign up for
their email and get packs delivered right to your inbox. You can also sign
up for a premium subscription and get access to all 1,500+ photos and
videos across the site.

Stocksnap

The team at Snappa created StockSnap, and the result is thousands of

images you can use under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). You can browse
by popular searches, or sort through images based on date, trending,
views, downloads, and more.

Pixabay

The quality of photos on Pixabay is a bit more hit or miss, but the
selection is much larger—you’ll have close to a million photos to choose
from. All images and videos on this site fall under Creative Commons Zero
(CC0), so feel free to download, modify, distribute, and use them royalty
free. You can also find illustrations and vector graphics on this site.

Burst
Burst launched not too long ago, and already features over 1,000 beautiful
free images. This resource exsits specifically to help entrepreneurs build
more visually appealing websites, products, and marketing campaigns.
Most of the photos you find on this site were taken in-house and typically
trend around various business themes. They even have a bunch of in-depth
case studies to help you start your own business.

Fonts

Have you ever sat in front of a document or a content management system

attempting to find the right font for your website? Scrolling through
dozens—if not hundreds—of fonts can take hours. Plus, it might be one of
the most tedious tasks ever. Luckily, there are tools to help you find the
right font (or combination of fonts) in a fraction of the time. Here are some
of our favorite font resources:

Type Anything

Type Anything is a simple tool that helps you create great font
combinations. Sift through font families and once you’ve found the one(s)
you like, you can adjust basically everything about the font, including: size,
weight, line height, opacity, letter spacing, capitalization, and more. Type
in your own content, and browse away!

Google Fonts

Google Fonts is an intuitive repository of Google’s fonts, which you can

explore, sort through, and use in more than 135 languages. For each listed
font, you can learn more about the designer and the inspiration behind its
creation. The thematic collections will also help you discover new fonts
that have been vetted by various designers and engineers at Google. Sort
fonts based on popularity, trends, and your geolocation, and create your
own collections for reference down the road.

Font Fit

One of the coolest things about Font Fit is that you can quickly see what
your preexisting website looks like with different fonts. This is a fast way to
get a visual on how different fonts impact the overall aesthetic of your site.
It’s also kinda fun to go to a well-designed site like Apple and see what it
looks like when everything is on Comic Sans. ;-)

Typewolf

Typewolf creator Jeremiah Shoaf said it best: “Seeing type samples set in
‘the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ isn’t very useful when it
comes to web design — seeing how real type performs on actual websites is
much more helpful.” This is one of the best font resources you’re going to
find on the web. Browse through a bunch of curated lists featuring fonts
from around the web to help you find the perfect one for your latest
project.

IconStore
In the IconStore, you’ll find find over 200 icon packs created by best-in-
class designers. Sift through everything from pizza icons, to Harry Potter
icons, to landmark icons. Download PNG and SVG files for anything you
find; each icon pack can be used in personal and commercial projects—no
attribution required.

The Stocks

The Stocks features a growing collection of icons that you can download
in an format, color, and size you need for a project. Choose from hundreds
of icons, and download PNG, SVG, and XML files for any of them. This site
also features photos, videos, fonts, mockups, and colors. Think of it as a
one-stop-shop for most of your design needs.

Swifticons

On the Swifticons site, you’ll find more than 2,000 high-quality icons,
which you can download in six editable styles: outlined, filled, colored,
jolly, flat, and pattern. You can download the entire pack of icons for under
$100—or opt for the activities pack (152 icons), which is yours for free.

Illustrio
Get ready to spend a lot of time playing around with icons on Illustrio.
There are hundreds of icons to choose from, and each one is highly
customizable—get each one in 16 different styles, and make each one any
color you want.

Color Palettes

Need to create a color palette for your latest website or project? It can take
a surprisingly long time to create a color scheme from scratch. Make the
process easier and browse through these sites for color palette inspiration:

Color Hunt

On Color Hunt, browse through countless palettes, comprised of four

colors each. You can browse and sort through the list based on what’s hot
and popular, or just pick “random” and see what comes up. Create your
own and share it on the site.

Web Gradients

Web Gradients is a collection of almost 200 background gradients,

created by the itmeo team. You can use each of these content backdrops
for any part of your website. You’ll find a .PNG version of each gradient, as
well as easy-to-copy CSS3 crossbrowser code. Bonus: there are even
curated packs for Sketch & Photoshop.
Coolors

Coolors is a super fast color scheme generator. You can explore

thousands of pre-existing color schemes (each one features five colors). Or,
you can generate your own in a matter of minutes. Once you go to the
“generate” page, hit the space bar to start with a different color scheme,
and then you can adjust each color’s hue, saturation, and brightness
accordingly.

LOL Colors

It has to be said: we just love the name LOL Colors. This site features a
curated selection of color palette inspiration. If you’re starting from scratch
and aren’t quite sure what you’re looking for yet, this is a fun and quick
way to browse through various color scheme options.

We hope you found a few great resources on this list to make your next
website, product, or project beautiful. If you’re looking for more free (or
cheap) design resources, check out the full collection on Product
Hunt. 💚
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Dragos Nicolaescu